CURRICULUM VITAE

FANG-KUO SUN

Expertise

technical areas

• image/signal processing, interpretation and communication.
• pattern recognition, target detection and discrimination
• system modeling/identification, simulation and evaluation
• operation research and statistical data analysis
• software/information system design, development and integration.

management

• project definition, development and management

Education

Ph.D.  1976   Decision and Control, Harvard University
M.S.   1972   Electrical Engineering, University of Pittsburgh
B.S.   1969   Control Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University

Technical Background

• Demonstrated industrial experiences and academic records in the areas of image analysis and computer vision, estimation, modeling and detection, software engineering and operation research(decision theory and analysis), e.g. 14 years direct technical contributions to the US Government programs on modeling and evaluation of strategic weapon systems.
• Contributed to multi-disciplinary research and development areas including geographical information system (GIS) for decision support, meteorological research in the design and implementation of weather information management/analysis system and modeling of reentry weather effects on weapon system accuracy, biomedical pattern recognition and modeling, automotive research in the modeling of chemical processes, and economic theory of game.
• Demonstrated ability in technique/algorithm development, production software writing (in C/UNIX), system design, development and documentation, e.g. geographic database production system, meteorological data analysis system, ...

Professional Experience

Founder, Reading Information Technology, Inc., 1991-present

• building a technical service and software engineering company base on the commercialization of advances information processing/analysis, management and communication technologies

• chairing the Technical Subcommittee, Committee on the Development of National GIS Initiative, Steering Committee for Information Development, the Executive Yuan, the Republic of China.
• technical consultant to the Science & Technology Advisory Group, the Executive Yuan, the Republic of China, on the National GIS initiative.
• technical consultant to the Institute for Information Industry on GIS, image and graphics projects

Division Staff Analyst, TASC, 1988-1991

• develop and implement algorithms for an advanced US Government research project on the multi-source geographic information and decision support system development

• data integration from satellite-borne sensors(LANDSAT panchromatic and mulitispectral images), DMA level I DTED, and scanned hardcopy maps
• slope estimation from the level I DTED, using image analysis techniques
• digital elevation models (DEM) derivation from stereo vision using the SPOT satellite data (HRV sensors, push-broom CCD scanner)
• soil material classification using multi-spectral TM images from the LANDSAT
• data format for the co-registration of multi-source data given in different geographic projection and earth models

• support the US Government on modeling, evaluation and accuracy prediction of a strategic weapon system

• project leader (a multi-year, multi-million project) for a team of analysts, meteorologists and programmers to evaluate the accuracy of the fire control target-offset procedure for weather compensation
• methodology development for analyzing temporal/spatial variability of the effects of wind and density on reentry bodies
• technique development and implementation for modeling these weather effects, using several years of RAOB data (collected by NCDC) over the entire target area
• temporal geographic database management system development to provide analysts with an easy access to the vast amount of weather data and system and statistical analysis tools to support the Trident II system accuracy prediction

• lead IR&D effort on development and implementation of advanced techniques in computer vision for image interpretation, understanding and communication

• basic techniques in motion analysis for optical flow estimation, recovery of 3-D motion and 3-D object structure for satellite time-varying image compression and cloud estimation and tracking
• image compression using morphological pyramid for progressive transmission
• morphological shape recognition in AM/FM applications
• multi-source multi-spectral image analysis tool development

• actively participate in industry/University technical exchange and research cooperation
• plan and develop new divisional business areas and write proposals

Department Staff Analyst, TASC, 1981-1988

• contributed to the initial phase of technical marketing, project definition and proposal writing for the US Government weather evaluation project
• developed and implemented various methodologies and statistical techniques for weapon system improved accuracy & evaluation, for data obtained from multiple independent system tests

• validation of a large weapon system error models for the entire multi-phase system operations including the navigation, prelaunch, guidance and reentry
• structural verification methodology using a generalized disturbance approach (a generalization of GLR for jump detection) and modern spectral analysis techniques for the dynamic structure of weapon system error models

• develop a morphological image processing system as atestbed for algorithm development in applications such as laser tracking of a moving target (synthesized images), cloud tracking and segmentation (GOES IR and visible images) and recognition of utility maps

Member of Technical Staffs, TASC, 1978-1981

• developed and implemented techniques for validating the initial conditions and bias states of a strategic weapon system model, given data from multiple independent system tests
• performed the weapon system error analysis and quantitative assessment of test plan options and tradeoff analysis on various instrumentation suites

Research Associate, the Scientific Research Laboratory, Ford Motor Company, 1976-1977

• developed a macro approach, which combined the limited physical insights and modern identification techniques, to the mathematical modeling of three-way catalysts.

Research Assistant, Division of Applied Sciences, Harvard University, 1972-1976

• did research on multi-person decision theory and theoretical foundation for ec\x\valuating information in a strictly competitive environment.
• did research on database management for automatic warehouse application.

Teaching Assistant, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 1970-1972

• did research in pattern recognition of human chromosomes and biological modeling.

Professional Activities

• Member of program committee for FEGIS'93: Far East Workshop on Geographic Information System, June 18-19, 1993, Singapore
• Keynote speaker on "Information Factory & its Management" for the 1992 National GIS Workshop, Taipei, Dec., 1992
• Invited speaker for a special workshop on "Geographic Information System: Terrain Database", Microelectronics and Information Systems Research Center National Chiao-Tung University, Nov. 14-15,1992
• Fellow of SPIE, Senior member of IEEE and member of SIAM
• Member of program committee and co-chair in mathematical morphology session for SPIE Conference on Visual Communications and Image Processing since 1987
• Chairperson for system identification session in 1984 IEEE conference on decision and Control